November 18, 2009

Is The Great Twitter Scare Waning?

Can it be that The Great Twitter Scare Of '09 is starting to wane? Comscore reports that Twitter usage in the U.S. dropped about 8% in October. That's a lot to drop in one month.

In fact, Twitter usage has dropped in two of the last three months. The only month of the last three in which it grew was September, in which it grew less than 1%.

Digital Agency Guy Makes Sense

As you all know, I like to take swings at bullshit. Lately, social media bullshit has been my favorite target.

However, as I often say (but am never remembered for) it is not social media per se that makes me gag (after all, I am a blogger,) it's the nonsense promulgated by social media zealots, hustlers and bullshit artists that gets me going.

This weekend I read an intelligent piece called The Content Delusion by a digital agency guy, Eric Karjaluoto. Not only did he make sense, he did it without using the words "conversation" or "engagement" even once. And that, my friends, is a record.

I got through two paragraphs of this cliche-fest and had to quit before my brains fell out.

On the other, other hand, nice little illustration on the page by my former colleague David Fullarton.

Friday In Seattle

Last Friday I had the pleasure of speaking to the radio industry group up in Seattle (the PSRBA.)

The topic of my talk was "The Three Most Annoying Trends in Advertising." And, as I said to them, it was hard to pick just three.

I believe they taped the event and I hope to get a look at it soon. If it's not too embarrassing, I'll post it here.

The Geniuses Who Run Our World

The City of Oakland (where I live) has a very high dropout rate among high schoolers (over 30%) which it would like to lower. Like all political entities, the city will do everything possible except address the actual problem -- bad parenting.

Of course, the first thing they did was to have a conference. A conference is a great thing to have because it gives you the feeling that you're doing something while you're actually doing nothing. It's activity without progress.

At the conference, the following suggestion on lowering dropout rates was seriously discussed -- eliminate the grade of "D."

Apparently, in the educational bureaucracy these days, whether kids actually learn something is of secondary importance.

The Geniuses Who Buy Online Media

Interactive maniacs are always going on and on about how efficient online advertising is because of geo-targeting and behavioral targeting and who-know-what-kind-of-bullshit-targeting.

So yesterday I went to my company's Facebook page. There I found an ad for Nissan. First of all, no one has been to our Facebook page in about a year, including me. The only reason I got there was because I clicked the wrong link. Second, our biggest client is Toyota, which it says right on our page.

So some knucklehead at Nissan is paying good money to advertise on a site nobody goes to in a social media environment that is completely hostile to his brand.

That's some smart marketing, baby.

Bully Awards Update

So far, we've had great response to the Bully Awardsfor Achievement in Advertising and Marketing Bullshit. If you'd like to nominate something, just click on this link. As soon as I get some time, I'm going to start posting the nominees and give you a chance to vote. Some should be posted by Monday. Nominees accepted until December 1st.

Ad Contrarian Says:

"Delusional thinking isn't just acceptable in marketing today -- it's mandatory.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."